Darcee J. Hall, Krista J. Munroe-Chandler, PhD, Todd M. Loughead, PhD

Coaches are a central component in sport, responsible for managing team and athlete performance, development and well-being. Increasingly, coaching has been recognized as a performance domain characterized by performance, organizational and personal stressors (Thelwell et al., 2008) that can negatively impact coaching effectiveness (Olusoga et al., 2010; Thelwell et al., 2010). Despite these challenges, coaches report having limited access to resources that support coping with these demands (Sheehy et al., 2019). One potentially effective yet under-investigated coping strategy amongst coaches is psychological skills training (PST). Although there is strong empirical support for PST among athletes, research examining coaches’ use of psychological skills to regulate their own performance demands remains limited (Olusoga et al., 2014). The proposed study will examine how Canadian university and collegiate coaches learn, use, and perceive psychological skills to cope with the demands of high-performance sport using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. In the quantitative phase, coaches will complete an adapted version of the Test of Performance Strategies (TOPS-2) to assess the frequency and context of psychological skill use. A sample of coaches will then take part in one-on-one interviews furthering our understanding of coaches’ use of psychological skills (the why). Guided by a pragmatic paradigm, interview data will be analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s (2019) six-step thematic analysis. Findings will provide foundational insight into coaches’ psychological skill use and help inform the development of coach specific PST interventions aimed at supporting their well-being.